This weekend I was tasked with shooting a symphony orchestra for a recording session in Seattle’s Studio X. My clients were the people hiring the players, so I didn’t have carte blanche with how I wanted to execute a lighting scheme or capturing performances. In fact, I couldn’t even take a shot while the musicians were performing since shutter clicks and strobes popping would make it into all of those fantastic old Neumann microphones. So instead I would grab what I could during the lulls between recording passes.
The lighting scheme consisted of Nikon SB shoe-mounted strobes at each end of the room with full CTO gels to bounce off of the large, white walls and one mounted near the ceiling behind the conductor with a Justin Clamp and a 1/2 CTO gel for a different zone of color. The CTO business is all moot since these ultimately wound up black and white, but I was balancing my strobes with the available tungsten light. To read more about the concept of gelling your lights to balance color, head on over to Strobist and read this article.
The other shots were taken with available light in the control room using a 50mm f/1.4. I love shallow depth of field when making these types of shots.
Photographer Jill Greenberg has developed a style that is often imitated and described by some as hyper real. Being a bit of a lighting nut, the forums I follow have spilled much discussion reverse engineering her ringflash-based portraiture.
This clip shows a little behind the scenes footage of her set-ups and though process while working with various animals including her “Monkey Portraits” series.
Tonight’s session was at the home of John and Norma, or Besta and Mormor as Erika Newman knows them. They are Erika’s next-door neighbors and with Erika’s family being primarily located in the South, have also been her local grandparents.
John, Norma Erika has previously done a Sears portrait session, but John’s mobility is an issue these days so I went to their quaint home in Greenwood with a couple of lights and my D200.
The area behind John’s chair is the entryway to their house and not particularly flattering. I worked with a 43″ shoot-thru umbrella to camera left to light John and use a snooted strobe to camera right to light Norma. I like this look for knocking the background down several stops.
I won’t go into all of the details, but in an unexpected turn of events and with a great deal of luck I was able to get Erika to stop crying due to being seriously over-tired, likely hungry and not too happy that my daughter was hoarding her Ariel doll. My window wound up being about 10 frames of her in a good state.
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